T.H. Huxley s Hideous Revolution In Science

Transcription

1 T.H. Huxley s Hideous Revolution In Science by Paul Glumaz Introduction June 4 A hideous revolution took place in the sciences and in our culture during the latter part of the Nineteenth Century, which had the aim of remaking the self-conception of the human species from that of a cognitive and creative being made in the image of the Creator, to that of an instinct-driven ape-like creature. This hideous cultural and scientific revolution has been so successful, that while we live in a world of potentially unlimited scientific progress, our descent into a totally bestial view of man has created both an inability to realize this potential, and with it an existential crisis for the human race. This hideous revolution was instigated and carried out by a core group of individuals who took over the world s scientific establishments, first in Great Britain, and then later the rest of the world. The principal organizer, minister of propaganda, and subsequent pope of this group was Thomas H. Huxley ( ). The group based this revolution on the work of Charles Darwin ( ), and used his idea of natural selection, to create a religious -like belief-system to explain evolution, based on competition, or the struggle for survival of the fittest. This belief-system was then extended to all areas of culture, science, and religion. We call this revolution Malthusian, because Charles Darwin credited Thomas Malthus as the Thomas H. Huxley, depicted in an etching by Leopold Flameng, source of his concept of natural selection. Thomas Malthus ( ) was a British East India Company economist, and a professor at Haileybury College, the British East India Company s school in London. Malthus s Essay on Population popularized the ideas of an earlier Venetian economist, Gianmaria Ortes. Malthus and Ortes asserted that population always increases at a greater rate than the material means to sustain that population. Darwin, in turn, used this tenet to claim that this population pressure, of more individuals being born than can survive within any species of plant or animal, is the driver which causes nature to select out the fittest. This process of selection of the fittest, is the reason that some traits survive in a species, while others do not. This idea of the fittest governs the outcome of the variability within a given species, and the creation of new species, or evolution. These fittest concepts that were developed in biology by Charles Darwin to explain natural selection, were then extended to the general scientific, social, economic, and cultural realms by Thomas Huxley and his group. An associate of Darwin and Huxley, Herbert Spencer ( ), applied Darwinian survival of the fittest in the social and economic realms. It was Spencer who developed the concept of Social Darwinism. In the economic realm, the Darwinian view was used to justify free trade ideol Years of Stupidity EIR June 12, 2015

2 ogy, and the brutal exploitation of subject populations. This included justifying the deliberately-induced famines imposed on colonies such as India and Ireland. Later these Darwinian notions become the basis of the eugenics movement, that culminated with Adolf Hitler s racial-hygiene approach to the slave labor exploitation and mass murder of undesirables and captive populations. Eliminate Plato and the Augustans At the beginning of the Nineteenth Century, with the success of the American Revolution and its implications, there was a profound optimism about what humanity could discover and develop. On the continent of Europe and in the new American republic, there was an explosion of scientific investigation and invention, accompanied by a growing interest in these matters by the general population. At the same time, a global private empire had emerged around the British East India Company, that had dominance over trade and finance, based on colonies, plantations, and slave labor. This empire was threatened by the implications of the growth of scientific progress, and its effects on their global system of slavery. It feared the emergence of nation state-republics as vehicles for expanding scientific progress. This progress would give nations the economic power to resist the empire. But most of all, the spirit of progress itself would ennoble the people, and make them unwilling to accept subservience to any system of tyranny. How does an empire deal with this, if their leading families and their members are at best amateurs in science? By the 1830s and 1840s there was a desperate sense in Great Britain, the seat of the empire, that all would be lost if no counter could be found to the spirit of scientific optimism. So a new pseudo-science was created to crush this spirit. To accomplish this, they recruited a group of intellectuals from the lower classes who had the drive and the discipline that the leading families and their members lacked. Thomas H. Huxley ( ) was the leader of this group. Huxley s real enemy: Plato Although Huxley experienced a harsh and impoverished early life, he was inducted into the most prestigious scientific association in Great Britain, the British Royal Society, at the age of twenty-five. This remarkable change of fortune, in a society of rigid class barriers based on birth, attests that Huxley was supported by powerful patrons. By the time Thomas Huxley was seventeen years of age, he had developed a lacerating, scornful, and sarcastic wit, accompanied by a deep pessimism about the human condition. Unlike his well-educated peers, Huxley had only two years of formal grammar school education. He was apprenticed at age thirteen, and again at fifteen, to two different surgeons. While his age-cohort attended Oxford or Cambridge, Huxley attended to the most impoverished, who were dying of typhoid, venereal disease, malnutrition, and alcoholism in the worst of London s slums. Later, Huxley attended medical school with funds borrowed from his family, showing great promise and winning prizes in Anatomy. However, his poverty prevented him from finishing his education to become a licensed Physician. In early life, Huxley had developed superb drawing skills, which Vatican Museum were useful for making accurate drawings from microscopic observations. This skill enabled him to join the British Navy, as a surgeon s assistant on the research vessel H.M.S. Rattlesnake. His work on drawing newly-discovered sea-organisms off the coast of Australia, as part of the four-year expedition, placed Huxley in the elite of the emerging discipline of Comparative Anatomy. Upon returning from this expedition, Huxley was allowed to leave the navy, without penalty, long before his term of service ended. Soon after, he became a leading member of Britain s scientific establishment. Leonard Huxley, Thomas Huxley s son, later recounts in the Life and Letters of Thomas Huxley, that his father told him: Plato was the founder of all the vague and unsound thinking that has burdened philosophy, deserting facts for the possibilities and then, after June 12, 2015 EIR 100 Years of Stupidity 19

3 long and beautiful stories of what might be, telling you he doesn t quite believe them himself. The movement of modern philosophy is back to the position of the old Ionian philosophers, but strengthened and clarified by sound scientific ideas. The thread of philosophical development is not the lines usually laid down for it. It goes from Democritus and the rest to the Epicureans and then to the Stoics, who tried to reconcile it with popular theological ideas. Huxley was clear that the Empire s real enemy was Plato, and that the Empire needs society s world view to revert to the materialism of Democritus, and the empiricism of Epicurus. Huxley later developed the term agnosticism to represent a key aspect of this return to materialism and empiricism. Thomas Huxley s deeper intention was a revolution against any system of thought which had any trace of Socratic or Platonic thinking, whether in science, religion, culture, or philosophy. By the 1870s, Huxley had achieved much of this revolution. He was the leader of a small group of nine, who met monthly and called themselves the X-Club. They took over the institutions of science and education in Great Britain, and later the world. Change in the Biosphere In the latter part of the Eighteenth Century, as progress in Science had begun to change the world in a very profound way, discoveries in geology began to contradict the accepted religious view of Creation. Up until this time the strict Biblical view of Creation had never been challenged by science. Leading Geologist Sir Charles Lyell ( ), in his work Principles of Geology, established that steady changes were the primary cause of most geological formations. He also showed that these formations developed over very long spans of time, in direct opposition to the interpretations of Scripture. In efforts to discover the origin and age of formations in geology, discoveries of numerous fossils occurred. Some of these fossils were of biological organisms that no longer existed. This caused great turmoil between science and religion. In France, Georges Cuvier ( ) and Ettiene Geoffroy Saint Hillaire ( ) were collaborators at the Museum of Natural History in Paris. From their work at the Museum, Cuvier founded the disciplines of Comparative Anatomy and Paleontology, while Geoffroy founded Teratology, the study of animal malformation. Cuvier argued that the anatomy of an organism of any species is so intricately coordinated functionally and structurally that no part of an organism could change without changing all the other parts of the organism. Such a change of one part by itself would result in the death of the organism. This is known as Cuvier s correlation of parts principle. While Cuvier focused on correlation of parts, Geoffroy focused on malformations and vestiges in biological organisms. These two areas were viewed by Geoffroy as windows into the inherent potential for change in an organism. Geoffroy s view differed from Cuvier. For Geoffroy, the anatomy of an organism determined a potential range of function. This range of potential function could be greater or different than the actual functions of an organism. For Geoffroy, the development of an organism s anatomy determined its functional possibilities. Since Geoffroy thought that all animals exhibit the same fundamental plan, or archetype, he saw no reason why all organisms could not have evolved from a single progenitor. From the studies of embryos of vertebrates, Geoffroy came up with three parts of his unity of composition principle. One was the law of development, whereby no organ arises or disappears suddenly. This explained vestiges. The second was the law of compensation, that an organ can grow disproportionately only at the expense of other organs. The third was the law of relative position, that all the parts of all animals maintain the same positions relative to each other. These three parts of Geoffroy s unity of composition conception suggested that there were coordinated pathways for change within an organism, within certain boundaries of proportion and harmonics. By the early 1820s, Cuvier and Geoffroy had come into severe disagreement over the origins of anatomical forms. This difference culminated in a historic public debate in The issues raised in this debate have not been resolved to this day. Jean Baptiste Lamarck ( ,) a contemporary of Cuvier and Geoffroy, developed the theory that in minor aspects, an organism s adaptation to the environment can be passed on through inheritance. But more importantly, Lamarck was the first to posit that the principle of life was the driver of the physical and chemical changes on the Earth, and that these changes were not driven by chemistry or physics as such. In other words, Lamarck viewed the evolution of life not as a survival Years of Stupidity EIR June 12, 2015

4 of the fittest response to the environment, but that the principle of life is the creator of the physical environment in which living processes further evolve. By the first part of the 1800s a scientific sense that living processes and their environments evolve and change had emerged. The question of how this evolution occurred, or could be explained, became the new battleground for conflicting world views. It was Thomas Huxley s intention to use the conflict between empirical evidence and the strict interpretation of Scriptures to eliminate the influence of Plato. His intention was to impose a bestial conception of man upon humanity through the descent from apes, and to bypass the issues of principle in the Cuvier/Geoffroy debate by focusing attention on an assumed, impossible-to-prove mechanism for evolution: random changes in the small. This mechanism to bypass the issues raised by Cuvier, Geoffroy, and Lamarck was found by Huxley in Charles Darwin s work. It also allowed him to bypass the larger issue of the physical evolution of the earth caused by the evolution of life, which was posed by Lamarck. Darwin s Controller Charles Darwin ( ) was one of a number of wealthy heirs to the Wedgewood pottery manufacturing fortune. He was of ill health, and with his fortune he retired to his estate to study biology. In 1838, after reading Thomas Malthus s On Population, Darwin formulated a theory of evolution based on the natural selection of the fittest. Darwin s theories and intentions to publish and promulgate this view of natural selection were well-known to an inner group for decades. In the early 1850s Huxley had been introduced to Darwin and by the middle of the 1850s Huxley they were in close collaboration. While Huxley subsequently became the principal champion of Darwin s theories of evolution by natural selection, Huxley was well aware of the unscientific nature of Darwin s thesis. Even though Darwin would call Huxley my bulldog, Huxley, the Comparative Anatomist, had a personal preference for the views of Cuvier on the question of evolution. Nonetheless Huxley played a leading role in forcing Charles Darwin to publish Origin of the Species in In a personal letter to his friend and closest collaborator, Joseph Dalton Hooker ( ), dated September 5, 1858, Thomas Huxley exposed something of his intentions for supporting the publication of Darwin s work. Huxley s protègé Charles Darwin, depicted as A Venerable Orang-outang, in the satirical magazine The Hornet. Wallace s impetus seems to have set Darwin going in earnest, and I am rejoiced to hear we shall learn his views in full, at last. I look forward to a great revolution being effected. Depend upon it, in natural history, and everything else, when the English mind fully determines to work a thing out, it will do it better than any other. I firmly believe in the advent of an English Epoch in science and art, which will lick the Augustan (which, by the bye had neither science nor art in our sense, but you know what I mean) into fits. Thomas Huxley looked forward to a great revolution, even though he scientifically disagreed with Darwin s ideas. Huxley s conception was not just a revolution in science, but in art, and culture as well. The issue was licking the Augustan into fits. When Huxley wrote this comment to Hooker, although the British Empire ruled most of the world, it did not rule the world of culture. Nor did the empire control the culture internal to Great Britain, which was still influenced by a previous age. The word Augustan refers to the Augustan Age, the June 12, 2015 EIR 100 Years of Stupidity 21

5 cultural period of Jonathan Swift, his friend Alexander Pope, and others, whose influence reached far into the Nineteenth Century. The great Swift was a progenitor of the American Revolution; of course his ideas had nothing in common with those Huxley wanted to promote. The reference that Huxley makes to Wallace in the quote refers to Alfred Russell Wallace ( ) Wallace was an explorer and zoologist, and after a similar encounter with Malthus, had devised a theory of evolution similar to Darwin s. Upon planning to publish his theories before Darwin, numerous men of science intervened to convince Wallace to hold off until Darwin published Origin of the Species giving Wallace joint credit. These men felt that Darwin s formulation of natural selection and more elaborate supporting biological documentation, were a better vehicle than Wallace s presentation. Also Wallace was not a member of the inner group involved in Huxley s revolution. Many have said that Geoffroy s views were the forerunner to Darwin s thesis because they made the idea of evolution more respectable. Darwin s views were not similar to Geoffroy s, or Cuvier s or Lamarck s; because they were all looking for a principle, whereas there are no principles in Darwin s theory other than unknowable randomness. Darwin s ideas of natural selection and survival of the fittest imply no directionality to evolution. For instance, in Geoffrey s conception, something evolves out of something, which demonstrates a lawful progression or process of some kind. For Geoffroy, evolution implies a plan, a blueprint or a potential within some archetypical design. Rejecting Geoffroy s view that there is such an inherent potential in evolution, as Darwin does, creates an insoluble paradox. Either the potential for change is inherent in the organism in which many parts are able to change, in a harmonic or coherent way, or it is not. Any random change of any part by itself will kill the organism. In today s biology, the complexity of metabolic processes that would have to be changed harmonically would be in the hundreds, if not thousands, of parts simultaneously. This would make Darwin s concept of evolution impossible. On the continent of Europe and in the U.S. there was strong opposition to Darwin and Huxley. In the United States one of the leaders who opposed them was the Yale professor and geologist Benjamin Silliman ( ) His scientific journal, Journal of American Science and Art was the principal science publication in America for most of a century, and was known to have corresponded with the Crelle s Journal of the European heirs to Leibnitz. Benjamin Silliman inspired several generations of young scientists. One of these was James Dwight Dana, who also became Silliman s son-in-law and successor as editor of the Journal of American Science and Art. James Dwight Dana, ( ), a contemporary of Thomas Huxley, developed from his own research the view that the directionality of the evolution of biological organisms seemed to proceed toward greater cephalization (from the Latin indicating head ). That is, the evolution of biological organisms seemed to occur in the direction toward the greater power of the nervous system in animals to respond and interact with the environment. Evolution, in this way, had a direction toward greater development. Generally, science outside of Great Britain at this time conceived evolution as occurring in a non-random, directed way in which the cognitive powers of humanity represent the pinnacle of the evolutionary process. To Huxley, this view of humanity was an anathema. It was in this context that he claimed both that all human beings are descended from the apes, and that mankind is in reality just another ape. To this end Thomas Huxley published his Man s Place in Nature. Apex to Ape It was always Huxley s intention to bring man down to the level of an ape. This was key to extinguishing the optimism in the culture that had emerged from the American Revolution. This was Huxley s most effective and direct attack on the concept that human beings are fundamentally distinct from the animals. The use of the idea that mankind is descended from the apes biologically, as the core of human identity, has so shaped the modern sense of human identity, in direct opposition to the concept of the human species being distinct from animals, that it is almost impossible for people today to know that they have any identity other than that of an instinct-driven ape-like creature. Whatever case is made for the anatomical and biological similarity between apes and humans, the species distinction for humans is not biological. Whether or not apes, or any other species going back to some ancient beginning, have or have not some genetic material connection to humanity, is beside the point. What makes us distinctly human is not biology, nor is it biologically determined. The human mind is outside the control of biological processes. Otherwise human will and scientific discoveries would be impossible Years of Stupidity EIR June 12, 2015

6 Huxley s outlook on biological determinism spread worldwide. Huxley s idea came to dominate human identity up to the present day. It became the assumption imbedded in Medicine, Psychology, Biology, Anthropology, and Popular Culture. This includes most emphatically the belief in the biological determinism of human behavior, character, and the potential to learn. Under Thomas Huxley s influence, the religious and political world increasing split into two groups. Those who found Huxley s bestial views of mankind abhorrent were encouraged to embrace the emerging Creationist party. Those who thought Creationism could not be sustained by the scientific evidence were encouraged to join Huxley s Darwinian Episcopate. This deep split in society still afflicts us to this day. American Opposition Thomas Huxley characterized his opponent, Benjamin Silliman, as the scientist with one eye on the facts and the other on Genesis. Benjamin Silliman rejected both Darwin and the Creationists. Instead Silliman emphasized that God s most essential work is being done by mankind through scientific discoveries. He held that while science may contradict one s imperfect understanding of God, it is by man discovering God s universal laws in the physical universe, that mankind is participating in God and is fulfilling God s intention for man, as well as ultimately increasing mankind s understanding of God. Later when British Prime Minister William Gladstone, on behalf of the Creationists, attacked Darwin and Huxley, Huxley said of Gladstone: It has always astonished me how a man after fifty or sixty years of life (Gladstone) among men could be so ignorant of the best way to handle his materials. If he had only read Dana, he would have found his case much better stated. Huxley considered Silliman and Dana effective opponents. With Huxley s man is an ape viewpoint, Huxley became the most popular lecturer in what was known as the workingman s lectures. His lectures on science deeply impacted the Socialists, the Communists, and the Labor Movement, as well as the Anarchists. The cadre of these movements were all indoctrinated into the materialist ape origins of the human species. This included Karl Marx and especially Frederick Engels, who totally embraced Huxley and his circle. At the core of the Communist and Socialist movements, and later the Soviet Union and its cultural catastrophe, lies the spoor of Thomas Huxley. Their vision of a workingman s utopia was strongly laced with the arsenic of Huxley s pessimism about humanity. A utopia which rejects the creative potential of the human species is a hellish place. The same Darwinian ideas of evolution were also at the core of Race Science. Many today would prefer to avoid discussing the fact that their most cherished views on evolution were the basis of the Race Science that Hilter practiced. Huxley led the way by being one of the first to classify the human race into four racial categories; Europeans, Mongolians, Negroes, and Australians. Each category was broken down into sub-categories, and classified according to various attributes, including intelligence. Natural selection was used to explain why the European race was superior. Huxley also took the Darwinian revolution into all the religious institutions, for which he developed the anti-theological term agnosticism. June 12, 2015 EIR 100 Years of Stupidity 23

7 Huxley s Darwinian revolution was exported everywhere. His legacy continued into the Twentieth Century through his last major protêgé, H.G. Wells, and his grandsons Aldous and Julian Huxley, who collaborated extensively with Wells. Darwin s Family Values The original full title of Darwin s 1859 work is Origin of the Species by Means of Natural Selection, or Preservation of the Favored Races in the Struggle for Life. Charles Darwin ( ) in his diary dated October 1838, tells us how he came up with his idea of Natural Selection: I happened to read for amusement Malthus On Population, and being well prepared to appreciate the struggle for existence which everywhere goes on, from long-continued observation of the habits of animals and plants, it at once struck me that under these circumstances favorable variations would tend to be preserved, and unfavorable ones to be destroyed. The result of this would be the formation of new species. Here, then, I had at least got a theory by which to work. This entry appears roughly 21 years prior to the publication of Darwin s work. Perhaps Darwin found this section from Malthus amusing: All children who are born beyond what would be required to keep up the population to a desired level, must necessarily perish, unless room be made for them by the death of grown persons.... Therefore... we should facilitate, instead of foolishly and vainly endeavoring to impede, the operations of nature in producing this mortality; and if we dread the too frequent visitation of the horrid form of famine, we should sedulously encourage the other forms of destruction, which compel nature to use... Instead of recommending cleanliness to the poor, we should encourage contrary habits... but above all we should reprobate specific remedies for ravaging diseases; and restrain those benevolent, but much mistaken men, who have thought they are doing a service to mankind by protecting schemes for the total extirpation of particular disease. (From Essay On The Principle Of Population.) Today we see the same exact view of Malthus within the British elite publicly exemplified by the likes of Prince Philip, and Prince Charles. Prince Philip s comment that in the event of being reincarnated, I would like to come back as a deadly virus to deal with the population problem, is a more condensed and pithy version of Malthus. In America this view is most publicly represented by Al Gore, President Barack Obama, and the Green movement. Charles Darwin was not just one individual who came up with a theory to explain evolution. Rather, he was an instrument of a network, much of it intermarried, which sought to justify mass murder. It is wrong to see Darwin as a scientist. He was complicit, and was, and still is, an instrument for mass murder. What follows is the filling-out of the intermarried network that he was a part of, and which is still active to this day. Darwin was intimately connected to the Malthusian party of the time, the Whigs. In 1834 the Whigs passed the Poor Laws. At that time, Darwin s dining companion was Harriet Martineau, who many thought would marry Darwin s brother Erasmus. Martineau was the Poor Law propagandist, whose novels helped win the battle for rounding up the poor and incarcerating them in poor-houses, so they would stop having children and be made to work. Darwin s first cousin and brother-in-law, Hensleigh Wedgwood ( ) was a well-known legal figure and historian, who wrote a book, On the Origins of Language, that sought to prove that language evolved from animal grunts. After Hensleigh s first wife s death, Hensleigh married Fannie or Frances McIntosh, the daughter of Sir James McIntosh. Sir James McIntosh was the closest friend and collaborator of Thomas Malthus. They both taught at the British East India Company Haileybury College. Fannie, while married to Hensleigh, had an extended affair with Darwin s brother Erasmus. The next first cousin of Darwin, Sir Francis Galton ( ), founded the eugenics movement. Dalton credited Darwin as the inspiration for the eugenics movement. Galton promoted the idea of culling the unfit from the human population. Hitler s racial hygiene policy had its beginnings with these two first cousins, Charles and Francis. Another of Darwin s first cousins, Sir John Lubbock, banker, biologist, Member of Parliament, extended Darwin s ideas to the study of social institutions and family property. Lubbock developed the concept that inheritable property rights were the highest form of social evolution; that society gradually evolved through stages. The rate of evolution in these stages was different for each race. As a member of Huxley s X- Club, Sir John also played a key political role in this revolution Years of Stupidity EIR June 12, 2015

8 Thomas Huxley s closest collaborator and co-founder of the X- Club was the botanist Joseph Dalton Hooker ( ) Hooker and Huxley both become Presidents of the Royal Society in the 1870s, and 1880s. Hooker succeeded his father as the chief Botanist of the Empire. Hooker is also Darwin s closest friend and collaborator, and is intimately involved in everything Darwin does and writes. Thus Huxley s closest collaborator is Darwin s closest collaborator. Joseph Hooker married Frances Henslow, the daughter of John Stevens Henslow. John Stevens Henslow ( ), Regis Professor of Botany at Oxford, was both the mentor of Herbert Spencer ( ), the popularizer of Social Darwinism. Competition for wealth, position, and privileges became the dominant driver for one s social sense of self. As a result, most people today, in their inner sense of identity, are failed persons. Very few reach the pinnacle in the race to the top. Everyone that doesn t, spends their life fantasizing that they had, or worshiping those they think have reached the top. One sees this in Obama s educational policy, Race To The Top. The sense of social solidarity and the sense of the general welfare of the nation is deeply undermined by this feral competitiveness and this social survival of the fittest ideal of Herbert Spencer. Huxley and Darwin s German collaborator was the zoologist Ernst Darwin, as well as a tutor to the children of Queen Victoria. It was Darwin s claim that Henslow, the father of his closest collaborator s wife, was also the individual who influenced him the most. The next major collaborator was Herbert Spencer ( ). Spencer was also a member of Huxley s X-Club. He was best known for having coined the phrases survival of the fittest, and Social Darwinism. Huxley and Spencer had first met at the salon of Mary Ann Evans (George Eliot) which included Harriet Martineau, John Stuart Mill, and John Chapman, the publisher of the free-trade journal The Economist. Along with Darwin, and Darwin s cousin Sir Francis Galton, Spencer was the major proselytizer of the idea of the innate racial superiority of the upper classes. In Spencer s grand universal scheme, the fittest were the socially and economically most successful in society. Spencer espoused the view that the savage or inferior races of mankind were the unfit and would die out. Spencer was against all charities, child labor laws, women s rights, and the education of the poor. Such measures, Spencer claimed, interfered with the laws of natural evolution. By the 1870s, Spencer became the most widely read philosopher in the English speaking world. Spencer s racist views and promotion of Social Darwinism had the greatest effect on our culture. It was the popularity of Spencer s promotion of Social Darwinism that led to the adoption of a feral competitiveness in our culture. Haeckel ( ). Haeckel s The History of Creation was the most-read book in the world explaining Darwin s ideas scientifically. Haeckel also founded the discipline of Ecology. He was the first to develop concepts of overpopulation and carrying capacity. Haeckel also promoted the notion that the social sciences should be governed by the discipline of Applied Biology. Applied Biology was Haeckel s term for eugenics. Among Huxley s and Darwin s group of scientists, there were two who eventually dissented. One of these was the explorer and zoologist Alfred Russell Wallace. The other was the geologist Sir Charles Lyell. Wallace was the co-discoverer of the principle of natural selection with Darwin. By 1864, Wallace had come into disagreement with Darwin and Huxley. Wallace had reached the conclusion that the evolution of matter in the universe could not have occurred in a gradual, or natural selection manner in three very critical instances. One of these instances was the transition from inorganic to biological matter. The second was the transition from biological matter to the existence of consciousness in higher animals. The third was the transition from higher animals sense of consciousness to the ability to reason in mankind. To Wallace these three leaps could not be explained by Darwin s theories. Eventually, Wallace become convinced that something outside ; something spiritual had to have in- June 12, 2015 EIR 100 Years of Stupidity 25

9 Sir Charles Lyell (left) and Sir Richard Owen (right), two of Darwin s scientific opponents. tervened to cause these leaps. This issue ultimately led Wallace to turn to spiritualism. Sir Charles Lyell had been a collaborator of Darwin since Lyell was also a friend and early promoter of Huxley. Nonetheless, Lyell had become very concerned that Darwin and Huxley were using gradualist evolutionary ideas to promote a catastrophic criminal view of mankind. Lyell strongly believed that human beings possessed faculties of reason that in no way could have emerged from Darwin s natural selection. Another contemporary of Darwin and Huxley, who had initially helped to promote Huxley into the Royal Society was Sir Richard Owen ( ) Huxley and Owen would engage in a bitter struggle over fundamental issues of science and evolution which lasted 40 years. Owen adopted the view of archetypes as opposed to natural selection. Since archetypes were seen as showing God s design, the battle of archetypes versus natural selection became in essence the battle of the Church of England versus the British East India Company crowd. Owen would later call Huxley a pervert with some perhaps congenital defect of mind for denying the divine in Nature. Twentieth-Century Eugenics The transition from Darwin and Huxley to the next generation, was marked by a change from theory to practice. The theories that were developed in the Malthusian Darwinian revolution, such as natural selection, survival of the fittest, the descent of man from the apes, and eugenics, gave way to the preparations for the mass murder of those deemed unfit. The most notable son of Charles Darwin was Leonard Darwin ( ). Leonard became the President of the British Eugenics society ( ), succeeding his father s cousin Francis Galton. Leonard Darwin s most important successor was Ronald A. Fisher ( ), who pioneered the study of statistics in genetics on which modern Darwinism was based. Fisher was notorious for refusing to shift away from his racist and eugenicist views after the defeat of Hitler. The modern Darwinopath, Richard Dawkins, claimed that Ronald Fisher was the greatest of Darwin s successors. Another son of Darwin was Horace Darwin. Horace was the co-founder, with Ronald Fisher and John Maynard Keynes, of the Cambridge Eugenics Society. So here we have two of Darwin s sons leading the way to establish the means to cull the human species of the unfit. Who are the unfit? The unfit are you, me, most of the human race, and any person or group so deemed. A key leader in the third generation of Malthus Darwinian revolution was Darwin s grandson, Charles Galton Darwin ( ) Charles Galton Darwin was the leading British physicist during World War II. He ran Britain s National Laboratories and led the British side of the Manhattan Atomic Bomb Project. After World War II, Charles retired to direct the British Eugenics Society until his death in Charles Galton Darwin was also the godson of Sir Francis Galton. In 1952, Charles Galton Darwin published The Next Million Years as his contribution to furthering eugenics and the Darwinian revolution. The Next Million Years recast the issue of eugenics not in terms of racial hygiene, but in terms of curbing population growth. Charles estimated that the time it would take for mankind to biologically evolve into a new species would be a million years. In the meantime, Charles said that the principal problem was that human beings were essentially wild animals that had not been domesticated, although he believed every effort should be made to do so. It was the British Eugenics Society and its American Years of Stupidity EIR June 12, 2015

10 extension which launched the Hastings Center on Euthanasia in the United Statesin the 1960s. It was the Hastings Center and its leading operative, Ezekiel Emmanuel, who crafted Obama s Health Care Reform to cull the poor and the elderly, and relieve society of the financial burden of the unfit. The granddaughter of Charles Darwin, Charles Galton Darwin s sister Margaret, married Geoffrey Keynes, the brother of John Maynard Keynes. The great-grandson of Charles Darwin, and son of Charles Galton Darwin, George Pember Darwin ( ) married Angela Huxley, the great-grand-daughter of Thomas Huxley. And so it goes. Evolution of Genocide In Germany, the second generation of Darwinians was led by leaders such as Alfred Ploetz ( ). Ploetz was an ardent follower of both Darwin and Haeckel, and became a leading member of the British Eugenics Society. He toured the United States extensively to popularize the eugenics movement in America. Ploetz was the first to name and develop the branch of medicine called racial hygiene. On returning to Germany in 1936, Ploetz, with his brother-in-law and protègé Ernst Rudin, was appointed by Adolph Hitler to oversee the justification of mass murder based on racial hygiene. One of the leading promoters of eugenics in the more recent period was Sir Crispin Tickell. Sir Crispin was the President of the Royal Geographical Society and a leading government official and adviser to Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. In the 1980s, Sir Crispin created the British Government-funded climate change movement to implement mass murder based on reducing carbon dioxide emissions. Sir Crispin Tickell s great-grand-father was Thomas Huxley. And so it goes on, generation after generation, of policies intended to cause mass genocide. By the year 1900, Darwinism was on the wane in the scientific community. It lacked the experimental proof that it needed to justify its tenets. Darwinism was under attack from many quarters. It lacked most of all, some discovery of an intermediate form, or missing link between man and ape. At last this missing evidence came in the form of the discovery at Piltdown, where the jaw of an ape was fused with the cranium of a human. Even this fabricated Shown, a sample of pre-nazi German Malthusian propaganda: Look who you re carrying. One person with birth defects over 60 years old costs an average of 50,000 Reichsmarks. link between man and ape, could not stem the erosion of Darwin s influence in the scientific community during the 1920s and 1930s. The fossil evidence did not exist to support the theory of natural selection. The fossil evidence to support Darwin does not exist to this day! It fell to Huxley s grandson, zoologist Julian Huxley to come to the rescue of the Darwinian revolution. Early in Julian Huxley s career, Julian had replaced Leonard Darwin as head of the British Eugenics Society. With the help of Thomas Huxley s last major protêgé, H.G. Wells, Julian Huxley launched a revival of Darwinism. This revival was named the evolutionary synthesis, or the new synthesis, or the modern synthesis. Under Julian Huxley s direction, a number of disciplines were merged. These were biochemistry, genetics, population studies, and ecological field studies. By merging these disciplines, a new model was created that June 12, 2015 EIR 100 Years of Stupidity 27

11 no longer needed the intermediate fossil evidence. In the new synthesis, the human animal was governed by biochemical and genetically determined processes down to the predisposition in all areas of behavior, intelligence, disease, sexual preferences, even altruism. The bases of the new synthesis are as follows: The genes or the DNA are continuously impacted by background radiation and other factors which cause mutation, or small changes in the DNA, and its sequences. This is called genetic drift. This genetic drift is supposedly constant. The DNA is supposed to be the blueprint that passes on inherited characteristics. Then the environment acts on these inherited changes in the organism, and selects out those changes that benefit the survival of individual organisms. Over time this leads to new species and evolution. Also involved is the concept of gene pool. If a group of organisms of one species become isolated geographically from others of the same species, the isolated part will tend to develop a separate gene pool, and there would be a more rapid rate of differentiation between the two populations. The new synthesis like the older version of natural selection has no directionality. The driver for the new synthesis is random changes in the small caused by the impact of background radiation. H.G. Wells and Julian Huxley collaborated in producing a very popular 1500 page book in 1939, The Science of Life. This book was what began the popular revival of Darwin in the population. The last paragraph of the Science of Ecology section on page 1011 stated: Unrestrained breeding, for man and animals alike, whether they are mice, lemmings, locusts, Italians, Hindoos, or Chinamen, is biologically a thoroughly evil thing. To Make All Agnostics The Darwinian revolution also infected other areas and disciplines. Two developments of importance occurred in the 1860s in the procession through the institutions of Huxley s group of associates. One was the founding of the X Club with nine members. The second was the formation of The Metaphysical Society ( ). The X Club sponsored and launched two press organs to support their revolution. One was the Weekly Reader, and the other was Natural History Review of which Huxley was part owner. Both these publications were used in the early 1860s to promote the pro-darwinian view. Thomas Huxley was the leading editor and polemicist in these publications. But both publications failed, and were replaced by a fully X-Club - backed publication that was launched in 1869 called Nature. Nature is still in existence. The other institution Huxley formed, the Metaphysical Society, brought together the most prominent men of science, religion, culture, and philosophy to a monthly dinner and discussion. The purpose of the Society was to meet and discuss fundamental issues such as Is God knowable? or What is a Lie?, or The Ethics of Belief, or What Is Death? Present were leading clerics, writers, philosophers, politicians, and scientists. Among the rotating chairmen were Thomas Huxley, Sir John Lubbock, and William Gladstone, the Prime Minister of Great Britain. From eye-witness descriptions, everyone was cordial, and the discussions would generally come down to Huxley demonstrating that the working hypothesis of science laboring gradually over the years through empirical work, was far superior to all the metaphysical speculation about anything. God was empirically unknowable. At an early age Thomas Huxley s interest in Philosophy had led him study Emmanuel Kant in German. Huxley had also become a convert to the Scottish philosopher Sir William Hamilton ( ). Both Kant and Hamilton maintained that God was unknowable. Based on the proposition of the unknowability of God, Huxley launched a movement in philosophy, religion, and science which he termed agnosticism. The aim of this movement was to eliminate anything that is Platonic or metaphysical in science. Huxley s agnosticism became the governing ideology, or the new religion of the empire. This new religion of agnosticism was not to be for the masses. This was the new religion of the functionaries of the empire; the scientists, the academics, and the enlightened liberal clerics. As for the masses, they would be given all the irrational feelings and beliefs they would want, but not the knowledge of universal principles. In an agnostically administrated empire, the masses can kill each other in perpetual conflict over their religious feelings. Under Huxley s agnostic Darwinian episcopate, a person of science can not assert the truthfulness of the Years of Stupidity EIR June 12, 2015

12 Thomas Huxley at the blackboard. existence of God. Nor can a person of science assert conversely that God does not exist. Both assertions maintain that human beings have a capacity to know, whereas an agnostic can not know, and by not knowing has no responsibility for mankind or the future. So what can be proven, as far as fundamental principles involving the lawfulness of the universe, according to the agnosticism which now rules the sciences? Nothing! So what is left? What is left is statistics! We don t know anything but statistical probabilities. In the agnosticism of modern science, there is no causality other than the bumping into each other of things in ways we can never fully understand, other than they are bumping into each other. What about Darwinism? It s the same thing! Random mutations in ways we can never know create statistical probabilities for increased survival for random changes caused by random events. In other words, human beings are unable to know the existence of any real causation, just statistics. Or to put it in another way, the lawfulness or unlawfulness of the Universe is unknowable to the human species. All we can know is our bumping into things. But the universe is not governed by statistically random processes! To believe so is to believe in the irrational. Not knowing the causes of things does not make them random. To substitute randomness for causality is not just unscientific it is insane. How is it possible to discover the science behind evolution, if anything but randomness as an explanation is outlawed? The real issue and the truths behind the revolution of Darwin and Huxley were political. Neither Thomas Huxley, nor his grandson Julian Huxley cared much for whether there was any truth in Darwin s theories. The issue for them was never truth, or science. The issue for them was who was going to control the ideas that govern the thinking of those who influence and run society! The issue was who would control science, and for whom. Without the Darwinian-Huxley revolution in the sciences, the empire of Malthusian genocide would have been defeated long ago. We would now be colonizing the solar system instead of entering a Dark Age collapse of civilization. The scientific truth of evolution and how it takes place is not yet known. What we do know is that it cannot be random. We know this because we are human beings, and we make plans for the future, and we are not random in our actions. In this age, the essence of being human is to wage war against this hideous revolution and recover the lost promise of the potential of our species. Sources Huxley, Leonard: Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley, Vol. I, Appleton, Morris, Desmond: From Devil s Disciple to Evolution s High Priest, Reading, Mass., Addison-Wesley, Lyons, Sherrie L: Thomas Henry Huxley, The Evolution of a Scientist, Prometheus Books, Fulton, John F. and Thompson, Elizabeth H.: Benjamin Silliman, Pathfinder in American Science, Yale U. School of Medicine, 1947 Prince Phillip s Radio Address in the 1980s in Germany. Hutton, R.H.: Accounts of 1885 Metaphysical Society Meetings. Blinderman, Charles: The Piltdown Inquest, Prometheus Books, Wells, H.G. and Huxley, Julian S.: The Science of Life, Garden City Publishing Co, Inc., Further Reading Ross, Jason: Evolution and Organismic Communication, Research Report, July 26, Carol Hugunin, Let s Bury Darwin, 21st Century Science and Technology, Spring June 12, 2015 EIR 100 Years of Stupidity 29